I've Never Been (Un) Happier

by Shaheen Bhatt

  My own relationships suffered because I lacked an awareness of my actions. My moods were constantly waxing and waning, and when there were downs, my predominant coping mechanism was to shut down completely. From my very first depressive episode I both consciously and unconsciously shut out the people who were nearest to me. Like so many depressives, I cloaked myself in silence. ‘Shame unravels human connection,’ says Dr Brene Brown and nothing could be more true. All the shame I felt deep down inside caused me to shut down, to hide, to stifle my voice. My family and friends suffered at the hands of my brooding silences, and my romantic relationships suffered in a myriad of other ways. I was unable to talk about how I felt and the few times I was, I didn’t believe the people I loved were strong enough to hear and contain what I had to say. For me, my inability to communicate was one of my biggest hurdles.

  By the time I was in my early twenties, depression had made me bitter and angry. Years of wrestling with my moods had taken their toll, and I had almost come to resent people who were capable of being happy. It had negatively impacted everything in my life from my health (I was always ill and suffered from chronic pain) to my pursuit of a career, and I was sick of it. My pain slowly began to twist and contort into rage. Everything made me angry. I was angry about how I felt, about how little control I seemed to have over my own mind. I was angry about the choices I had made because of how I felt. I was angry about how I was floundering while everyone around me was succeeding. Worst of all I was angry because no matter how angry I was about the state of my life and no matter how much I wanted it to be different I just couldn’t make the change happen. I was angry about who I was, and I took it out on the people I loved.

  In its worst moments, depression affects your ability to love as well as to be loved, leaving you incapable of either. So it’s hardly surprising that some of depression’s greatest damage is in the realm of relationships. While the psychological and emotional wear-and-tear that depression causes is palpable, the hushed, corrosive effect it has on relationships might not be as obvious at first. I’ve lived with depression for all my adult life, but it’s only now, almost twenty years in, that I’ve begun to understand what depression means to me and for me. It’s taken all these years’ worth of depressive episodes to become familiar with the particular texture of my sadness. The mistakes I’ve made and the hard-won truths I’ve learned, I did so the difficult way—through relentless experience.

  Before these lessons I was often oblivious to a very simple fact: the person living with depression is not the only one who suffers at its hands. Every family member, romantic partner and close friend suffers too. I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again, living with depression isn’t easy but loving someone who lives with depression isn’t easy either. It’s challenging enough to live with a depressive person who has learned how to navigate their episodes and has understood the impact they can have, but living with someone who does not understand what is happening to them is a whole other type of challenge.

  Depression is such an internal and solitary process that try as you might there is no way of truly explaining what it feels like and the fact of the matter is aside from providing you with love and understanding, there’s not much anyone close to you can do to help you through it. The snag is that relationships in general, even the ones that don’t have mental illness to contend with, are notoriously burdened with unrealistic expectations when it comes to understanding and problem-solving. You believe that the other person should ‘just know’ exactly what you’re going through while the other person believes it is their responsibility to help you feel better . . . but they often can’t. The truth is someone is never going to fully understand how you feel unless they’ve been through the same thing (sometimes not even then, and they’re certainly not going to understand if you don’t explain it to them), and it is not their responsibility to cure you of your sadness. And that’s okay—it’s a survivable reality—but it’s a reality that takes time and effort to come to terms with.

  Over time, I came up with a very basic rule for when I’m depressed. The rule is that when I feel an episode coming on or when I am in the throes of one, I say it. I tell my loved ones that I’m sad. I let them know my sadness is not in any way because of them and I assure them that if I need help, I will ask for it. For me, this simple step of taking the guesswork out of the process has made a tremendous difference and has significantly improved the quality of my relationships during tough times.

  Break Stuff

  The way I see it, it was the phase of anger in my depression—not the phase of suicidal ideation—that was my rock bottom. I say this because this was the point at which I lost sight of who I was. This was the point at which the empathy I believe defines me as a person was obscured by anger and frustration.

  I couldn’t help how I felt, and I had learned it wasn’t my fault I felt the way I did, but I had also learned neither was it anyone else’s. While I had begun to see how difficult it was for others to cope with my depression, I didn’t know where to begin taking responsibility for myself, and I blamed the world around me for what I had become.

  This phase of rock bottom for me was ironically a very happy and transformative time for my family: my sister had bagged her first role, completed her first film and was on the brink of life-altering fame. The joy I felt for my sister and my pride at her accomplishments was absolute, but her success also threw the disorder in my own life into sharp focus. The insecurities I had as a child—fears that I was lacking—all came rushing back. Everyone in my family belonged to a single industry; my parents, my older siblings, my cousins, my aunts and uncles, and now my younger sister, all made movies. I was surrounded by deeply ambitious, driven, successful, famous people. And here I was—with no more ambition than to leave my bedroom.

  I continued to work sporadically throughout my early and mid twenties, and I worked primarily on movies. But consistent, steady work continued to be hard for me. Working during longer depressive episodes took a huge physical and emotional toll because I had to hide and contain the worst of my moods and feelings. During one of the films I worked on as an assistant director, I spent every free second locked in the bathroom or in a secluded corner shaking with tears. I did that for one hundred and twenty days straight.

  For the most part when I grew up I felt an internal pressure to follow in the footsteps of my family, even though deep down I knew that it wasn’t what came naturally to me. My value system had become muddled and complicated by the success of my family and for a long time, I chased career paths that would lead me to the sort of life I thought I should be living. Despite my outgoing personality as a child, I have, as a result of my growing experiences, become a more reserved adult. I’m not a performer or someone who knows how to live in the spotlight. So, I was striving to be someone I no longer was. My reality is different from the reality of my father, mother and sister and it’s something I’m still learning to live with. People often ask me if it’s difficult to be the only person in my family who isn’t famous and my answer to that is: yes, of course it is, but not for the reasons you’d think.

  Having been a part of a ‘famous family’ and having witnessed fame up close my entire life I can tell you that fame isn’t ‘real’. My sister isn’t famous when we’re at home dealing with the monotonous details of our day-to-day lives, my mother isn’t Soni Razdan, the actor when she’s berating me for snapping at her for no good reason, and my father isn’t an award-winning director when we’re having absurd arguments that only fathers and daughters have. On every single day that does not involve a ridiculously long and tiring award show, or a complicated dash through a crowded airport, my so-called famous family is just beautifully, mundanely human. The issue with fame doesn’t come from the value I ascribe to it, rather the value that others ascribe to it. There is a cultural reverence for fame and celebrity that has insidiously convinced us all that we’re not enough the way we are, and when the person in the bedroom next to yours is someo
ne who’s photographed after a teeth cleaning or when she leaves the gym, there is bound to be an extended amount of confusion. As Chuck Palahniuk’s Tyler Durden so poetically put it in Fight Club: ‘We’re the middle children of history. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war . . . our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.’

  Depression deprives you of a good many things on its long, winding course and one of the first things it divests you of is your sense of self. For me, depression’s finest feat was tricking me out of an identity and that’s not the position you want to find yourself in when you’re surrounded by people with such towering, larger-than-life identities of their own. Devoid of an identity I made depression my identity Even when I had finally admitted to being depressed I continued to fight it for a very long time. I didn’t know how to separate what I had learned was an illness from my sense of self. I still saw it as a fatal flaw. I began to see my symptoms as defining personality traits rather than what they were: side effects of a troubled mind. When the people in my life told me I was negative, difficult and unfriendly, I believed that was just who I was deep down inside rather than attributing it to the fact that I was in pain. I embodied my illness and my illness became who I was in my mind.

  The realization that depression was not my identity came to me as an epiphany, but I can’t point to the thought processes that lead to this sudden understanding. I simply woke up one day tired of being boxed in by the labels I had earned over the course of the last twelve years, tired of being restricted by tags of negativity and pessimism. I wasn’t negative or pessimistic, I realized. If I was an inherently negative person I would never have been able to survive the havoc my mind wreaked. The only reason I made it through so many of my darkest days was that I had hope, a sense of humour and a steadfast belief that my pain didn’t signal the end of my life.

  Fake Happy

  During the sixties and seventies, as a response to preceding and ongoing global violence, the positivity movement was born.

  The world had just lived through two World Wars and back home in India, the country was still recovering from the fallout of a bloody and brutal struggle for independence along with the still reverberating after-effects of an equally brutal partition.

  This overload of relentless violence gave rise to global non-violence movements, as well as hippie counterculture that preached peace, passivity and a dogged focus on the quest for enlightenment.

  One aspect of these counterculture movements—positivity culture—skipped the fence and made the leap from counterculture to mainstream and, today, we’re still dealing with the fallout from it. Positivity culture preaches blinkered, single-minded focus on the positive and a commitment to turning a blind eye to anything that is negative.

  Positivity culture lives by the old, overused and very misunderstood adage, ‘When life hands you lemons, make lemonade.’ This is a statement we’ve heard so consistently and for so long that it’s now accepted as gospel and we don’t even pause to question whether or not it makes sense.‡

  In our search for silver linings, we’ve gotten so used to the idea of diverting our attention away from the clouds, that we’ve lost sight of the sky altogether.

  We furiously and constantly avoid or suppress negative feelings and on the off-chance that we do experience them, we make sure to tuck them carefully out of sight so as not to betray any signs of weakness.

  We shut down all avenues for vulnerability—shut down any situation that could leave us open to feeling pain or discomfort of any kind. ‘Normal and natural emotions are now seen as good or bad and positivity is seen as a new form of moral correctness,’ says Susan David, PhD, a psychologist on the faculty of Harvard Medical School and author of the book, Emotional Agility. ‘People with cancer are automatically told to just stay positive. Women, to stop being so angry. And the list goes on. It’s a tyranny. It’s a tyranny of positivity. And it’s cruel. Unkind. And ineffective. And we do it to others, and we do it to ourselves.’§

  Despite all the lessons I’ve learned over the years, despite all my inward gazing and all the self-awareness I believe I work hard to maintain I have a giant blindspot. I’ve avoided negative feelings and hidden them away so deftly and for so long, that I didn’t even notice that I’m still doing it. I didn’t realize I was avoiding negative feelings while basically making a career of talking about negative feelings.

  I’ve made an art of talking about my feelings without really acknowledging them or allowing myself to experience them. Even in therapy, I’ve mastered the skill of talking around how I feel with excessive intellectualizations of my emotional states and how I’ve gotten to be the person I am. I diligently avoid any and all conflict with family members and friends and on the occasions conflict does occur and I find myself overwhelmed, I promptly remove myself from the situation to only cry behind closed doors. If I fail to do so in time, the result is an angry cry-shouting outburst of emotion that only amplifies my anxieties.

  I’ve spent eighteen years feeling my feelings behind closed doors and I’ve gotten so good at it that I’ve forgotten how to be vulnerable.

  This may not sound like a massive deal.

  So I don’t like to cry in front of people or talk about what’s bothering me. So what? That’s okay, right? We all do it.

  Except, it really isn’t okay. All we’re doing when we choose to feel our feeling by ourselves is shut down every possible avenue for vulnerability and as a result, real, meaningful human connections.

  We aren’t made up of just the happy, jaunty, fair-weather bits of our personalities. The building blocks that make up who we are, are varied. They’re of different colours and patterns—I have a leopard-printed one that represents the often questionable taste of the quarter Gujju in me. They come in different sizes—the ‘negative body image’ block is gargantuan while the ‘confidence’ block is woefully small. And, different shapes—the ‘anxiety’ block is both a different shape and size every day.

  All these blocks mash together over time like a complicated, never-ending game of Tetris and the end result is us. The more time goes by, the more blocks pile up.

  Some of those blocks, or well, if we’re being honest—a lot of those blocks—are made up of, or represent things we wish weren’t there: Insecurities, grudges, hurt feelings and cleverly built defensive walls.

  Research on emotional suppression shows that when emotions are pushed aside or ignored, they only get stronger. Suppressing negative feelings, or insecurities, leads to the worst and most damaging human emotion: shame. The more you hide, the more you feel secretly and in silence, the more that shame grows and flourishes.¶

  Shame unravels human connection.** Shame teaches you to hide or pretend because if you show people who you truly are, they will reject you. Shame causes you to isolate yourself from the world around you, shame teaches you to shut down vulnerability because that’s how you get hurt. When you allow yourself to be vulnerable you leave yourself open to judgement and ridicule, you give others the chance to see what you think of as the inferior, inept, bad or ‘idiot’ side of you. The side of you that you’ve taken great pains to hide away. Yes, vulnerability leaves all those parts of us exposed, but vulnerability also opens us up to some profound rewards.

  Vulnerability is the bedrock upon which real, strong and lasting emotional connections are made. Think about your most important relationships—relationship with your partner, friends, parents or siblings; chances are you’ve shared more than a few vulnerable moments with them. Vulnerability lets people see you as who you really are and allows you to form relationships based on support and compassion rather than just admiration.

  ‘Vulnerability isn’t good or bad,’ says Dr Brene Brown. ‘It’s not what we call a dark emotion, nor is it alwa
ys a light, positive experience. Vulnerability is the core of all emotions and feelings. To feel is to be vulnerable. To believe vulnerability is a weakness is to believe feeling is a weakness.’

  We’ve spent so long running away from bad feeling that we’ve forgotten about the genuine value that sadness, pain and strife can add to our lives. We numb bad emotions without realizing that when you try to numb one emotion, you numb them all. Dr Brown goes on to point out that you can’t selectively numb the bad without numbing the good. So, when you numb pain, you also effectively numb joy.

  ‘We are caught up in a rigid culture that values relentless positivity over emotional agility, true resilience, and thriving,’ says Susan David. ‘And when we push aside difficult emotions in order to embrace false positivity, we lose our capacity to develop deep skills to help us deal with the world as it is, not as we wish it to be.’

  Depressives resort to silence to cloak shame and avoid vulnerability, almost out of necessity. And every time we choose not to talk about what’s really bothering us or disappear behind a locked door to feel our feelings, we hide away a part of who we are, and hiding them away doesn’t make those parts disappear. They stay painfully put while we create distance between us and the people we love and who love us.

  We wear ‘I’m okay’ masks, so no one can see how we really feel or ascertain the things that hurt us; we don’t show them who we really are, we isolate ourselves when we’re in pain and then we spend all our time wondering why no one gets us. They don’t get us because they have no idea who we are. How could they? We’ve never told them.